Luis Garicano career advice

Take the messy job:

The other option is to go for a messy job, where the output is the product of many different tasks, many of which affect each other.

The head of engineering at a manufacturing plant I know well must decide who to hire, which machines to buy, how to lay them down in the plant, negotiate with the workers and the higher ups the solutions proposed, and mobilise the resources to implement them. That task is extraordinarily hard to automate. Artificial intelligence commoditizes codified knowledge: textbooks, proofs, syntax. But it does not interface in a meaningful way with local knowledge, where a much larger share of the value of messy jobs is created. Even if artificial intelligence excelled at most of the single tasks that make up her job, it could not walk the factory floor to cajole a manager to redesign a production process.

A management consultant whose job consists entirely of producing slide decks is exposed. A consultant who spends half of her time reading the room, building client relationships, and navigating organizational politics has a bundle AI cannot replicate.

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